Welcome players, managers, coaches, team owners and guests to the International Hockey League! This message is intended to introduce you to the IHL and give you some information, as well as to let everyone sign up for it!

Second, I'd like to give you a brief overview of the schematics. Every team will have two power ratings: offense and defense. Offense will always overwhelm defense on the scale, so that there's never a guarantee of a shutout (though there is the possibility of it.) I've got this worked out with standard deviations and such, so no worries. To determine the score of a game, the formula is: offense own minus defense opponent equals goals scored, but these are based on a random number generator, so your team can perform well or poorly in any particular game. The rating determines how well they can perform on either end. You get to manage these ratings through several ways: trades and training.

You will create rosters of any distribution you choose. This is just to make the game more real and has no merit in the schematics of the game.

Trading players can have some merit, though. If your team is weak defensively and strong offensively and you trade a left wing for a goalie, for example, your defense rating will improve. This is by case. You are allowed one trade per week, and both teams must agree to the trade. You will not know your exact ratings but will be able to guess your team's strengths and weaknesses based on their performances in games.

Training sessions are freebies to increase your ratings by soft amounts. Once every week, you can choose an offense session or a defense session to give yourself a small boost to that rating. If you keep going up in one, though, due to neglecting the other after a while the other rating will deteroriate. Keep this in mind.

If you want to come up with names for your players for flavor, I'd encourage it. Also, another flavor element is the element of rivalries. In all sports, there are rivalries between teams. Once all teams are created, you will select one rival team (that cannot be owned by yourself) to be the rival for your team. When playing against this team, your ratings will be slightly improved as you will be energized when playing against them. Keep in mind that rivalries must be all matched. Every team may only have one other select it as its rival.

The size of your team is 16 players. The starting lineup consists of C, LW, RW, D, D and G and a bench of 10.

My most important rule is to have fun with this, and also, leave all politics out of this. This isn't a political thing and it's aside from alliance and national politics. We're all here to put that aside and have a little fun and play a game. In all reality, this is pretty simple. Don't worry about all these rules, I'm just outlaying all of them at once so they're all on the table. Don't worry about them.

Now, on to the most important part: what you have to do to sign up. Please respond to this thread with the following completed form:

You can have one to three teams, depending on what you feel you can manage. Good luck!

To the 17 teams who have already registered, welcome to the IHL. Please don't post your rosters in here, I'll be creating a seperate thread specificially for that later so that it will all be neat and organized for the purposes of trades and such. Now, I know more of you were interested in this league...I took a poll, so sign up right away! :D

Reichführer - January 29, 2007 08:27 PM (GMT)

Working on my rosters tonight, The New Kolnarena just opened in Aachen, And We'll use Molot Sports Arena and Stadiume Olympzika for the other two teams. :D Will post photos for them all.

Ralian Provinces - January 29, 2007 08:48 PM (GMT)

Excellent. Oh, to my lovely assistant managers...what's a good time/way to meet with you?